Learning dense representations of phrases at scale

Jinhyuk Lee, Mujeen Sung, Jaewoo Kang, Danqi Chen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

Open-domain question answering can be reformulated as a phrase retrieval problem, without the need for processing documents on-demand during inference (Seo et al., 2019). However, current phrase retrieval models heavily depend on sparse representations and still underperform retriever-reader approaches. In this work, we show for the first time that we can learn dense representations of phrases alone that achieve much stronger performance in open-domain QA. We present an effective method to learn phrase representations from the supervision of reading comprehension tasks, coupled with novel negative sampling methods. We also propose a query-side fine-tuning strategy, which can support transfer learning and reduce the discrepancy between training and inference. On five popular open-domain QA datasets, our model DensePhrases improves over previous phrase retrieval models by 15%-25% absolute accuracy and matches the performance of state-of-the-art retriever-reader models. Our model is easy to parallelize due to pure dense representations and processes more than 10 questions per second on CPUs. Finally, we directly use our pre-indexed dense phrase representations for two slot filling tasks, showing the promise of utilizing DensePhrases as a dense knowledge base for downstream tasks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages6634-6647
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781954085527
StatePublished - 2021
EventJoint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Aug 1 2021Aug 6 2021

Publication series

NameACL-IJCNLP 2021 - 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

ConferenceJoint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/1/218/6/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Learning dense representations of phrases at scale'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this